235 – An Update on The CBC Open Textbooks Project

[00:00:07] David: Hi and welcome to the IDEMS Podcast. I’m David Stern, a founding director of IDEMS, and it’s my privilege to be here with Michael Obiero, lecturer in Kenya, president of the Kenyan Maths Society, all round star. Michael, great to have you on again.

[00:00:23] Mike: Thank you so much, David, it’s always a pleasure having a conversation with you, and I’m looking forward to another interesting conversation.

[00:00:33] David: Well, it’s rather timely because you are in the throes of it at the moment with the grade 10 CBC curriculum just starting and the challenges maths teachers are facing. Do you want to just tell us some of what you had when you started talking to math teachers about what they’re now facing? They don’t have resources, they don’t know how to interact with the current students. Tell us what’s going on.

[00:00:59] Mike: Thanks a lot. It’s very interesting and also personal to me because my daughter’s in grade 10. The government is implementing the competency-based education curriculum, and this year they’re having the first cohort in grade 10, which was the former high schools, they’re now senior schools. So some of the challenges being experienced, I’ve been visiting schools around my home in Kakamega.

And this is sort of what’s happening in most schools, that we had significant delays by the government to distribute teaching and learning materials to schools. So this includes textbooks, teacher guides. And so when the grade 10 learners were getting to schools on January 12th, the schools didn’t have resources. Again, the teachers were not well retooled on how to deliver the curriculum to learners.

So some of the schools, and I visited quite a number, a teacher went to class and he tried to teach mathematics using the old model, which is like the lecture method. And, when he was in class, the students were perplexed they were at a loss of what is it doing, what is it trying to do? Because they’ve been taught mathematics differently.

So the teacher was at a loss on how to proceed, and he was thinking of going to junior high school to check with the teachers there about the approaches they were using to teach mathematics. Another teacher was telling me that the curriculum seems to be extremely broad and wide, and he was worried that in the approach that the government wants, which is learner centered, they are not going to be able to complete the curriculum in the expected time.

And in my visit, I was able to demonstrate, kind of coming up with a lesson plan of an activity, I was able to demonstrate how you can deliver a learner-centered class session with the learners using available resources in the class.

So there are so many challenges teachers are facing when it comes to competency-based education. Another challenge is that children are coming in with the different entry behaviour. Some went to schools where they were taught quite well with a good coverage of the syllabus, some went to schools where the syllabus was barely covered.

And so, balancing how to proceed was a challenge to some of the teachers. So these are just some of the challenges that the teachers who are explaining to us as we were having the conversations in schools.

[00:03:47] David: And your response to this is why I said we need to have this episode. Because you’d already had work last year preparing a grade 10 textbook, but early this year, seeing these challenges, you’ve decided that you need a whole teacher program, if you want, helping people as they teach this material for the first time. And so that’s what you are in the process of creating.

[00:04:13] Mike: That’s correct. So we’ve been developing digital resources, and these are in the form of textbooks that we hope will be approved by the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development and we decided to expedite the work on grade 10 because of the challenges we anticipated will be there. And as we are going to schools, teachers who are saying that they don’t know what a grade 10 book looks like. And we were able to share our resource with them, that this is how the resource looks like.

And you are right to point out that because of the unique challenges that teachers didn’t know how to approach teaching of a learner centered curriculum, we immediately thought of a tool that will help these teachers. And one of the tools was maybe designing a template lesson plan that could guide teachers in their thinking towards preparing of a class.

Some of these resources have been put together or are being put together into online courses, and the main reason of having an online course is we want to have a collaboration or communication between teachers, we want teachers to share experiences within their contexts. We need to get teacher perspectives on the resources we have so that we can improve them, because we’re thinking of long-term solutions to the problems we’re having now. This will be guiding principles maybe to future implementation of mathematics curriculum in the competency-based model.

[00:05:48] David: Absolutely. So I’ve looked at your resources, these courses which now exist and you’ve just got the first few topics covered, but you are planning over the next week or two to release all the courses that will go right throughout this first year. And I’m really impressed, these look great. As you say, it’s about enabling that peer to peer learning between teachers. It’s not about telling teachers what to do because nobody knows what to do here, they’re the first people to deliver this curriculum.

And so what we’re doing is we’re enabling them to work together, peer to peer, with experts supporting them. And we should say who the we is that you keep talking about, because you both wear the hat of a director of INNODEMS, this local social enterprise, but also you wear the hat of the president of the Kenyan Math Society. And as part of that, in some ways, you are also interacting with lecturers in maths education, in education more broadly, to try and get them engaged in researching what’s happening here, bringing this community together to actually work coherently on how can teachers deliver this competency-based curriculum in senior high school well, to get good results for their students? That’s what we’re aiming for.

[00:07:08] Mike: Exactly. And I’ll take you back a step before I go to the we. In one of my interaction with teachers, as I was demonstrating the book, he was pointing out that this resource might not be very ideal for my learners. And I told him, this is not us dictating what you should be teaching, but this is kind of a template of what you can have.

And if you think there’s a much better activity for your learners, you have that ability as a teacher to contribute to the development of the resources by telling us that this is a resource that will be ideal for my learners. So teachers interact with children in different backgrounds, you have teachers in urban areas, you have teachers in extremely rural areas, you have schools with computers, you have schools without computers. So you cannot have one resource that covers everything. So having a conversation between teachers on what works in the context is what we’re trying to develop.

Now I’ll go back to the we. 

[00:08:13] David: Before you go to the we, you’ve actually hit on the IDEMS piece of this. Because this is what we care about deeply, this is why we’re deeply involved. This idea of recognising that context matters, you know, we’re not interested in developing textbooks to develop textbooks. We are interested in the textbooks of the future, which recognise different variants in different contexts. We are inspired by this old project in the UK, the school mathematics project, where teachers were engaged in developing the learning resources. But because of publishing in those times, it had to be a textbook.

Whereas now, with technology, we can have multiple variants of textbooks which get customised, you get these different groups maybe for a rural context, an urban context, how do we start differentiating? How do the teachers themselves become the owners of this textbook? Because, and this is what’s so exciting, as an open textbook, if we can get the technologies right, then these learning cycles with teachers, they can take ownership of making the variants of the textbook or contributing to the variants of the textbook that suits their particular needs in their context, while also adhering to the government standards. And that’s a hard problem to solve.

[00:09:37] Mike: It is, especially in our context where funding is extremely limited and teachers sometimes don’t know how to contribute to development of resources. And so we are creating an opportunity for teachers to feel like they own this resource and this resource meets the demands in their context.

So, if you have a resource that doesn’t work for you, then you have that ability to model that resource into something that works for your context. So I think that’s the overall goal, we want teachers to be central to development of resources that address the needs of their teaching and of their learners, because at the heart of competence based education is the learner. And whatever the teacher does, the learner should always come first. So the resources should be able to support the learning process of the learner.

And I think I’m at a point where I can speak of the, we, and you alluded to that I’m a maths lecturer at the university. I teach mathematics and I have experience teaching and being a student of mathematics in the US, and some of the motivations that have taken me towards mathematics education is the learner experience and the foundations that we build around learners learning mathematics.

So I work with INNODEMS, I became one of the directors last year. It’s an organisation with the same core principles as IDEMS, and the goals are aligned with IDEMS. We want to promote learning of mathematical sciences, especially in resource constrained environments.

I’m also the chair of the Kenya Mathematical Society. So the foundations of mathematics is very central to what we are doing. We want to see mathematics promoted right from the pre-primary stage all the way to the university. So we are extremely interested in the idea of developing resources that support the teaching and learning of mathematics in this context. 

[00:11:59] David: And I really want to just hone in because you kept mentioning we, but it is the fact that you are leading an incredible team, but there’s almost no funding behind this. This is what’s so inspiring about this, and one the reasons we’re supporting as best we can. But it really is something which is a grassroots initiative of just passionate people putting the pieces together at a time which is so important in the Kenyan context.

[00:12:28] Mike: We were extremely lucky to get some initial funding from the American Embassy in 2024, towards the end of 2024. So it’s that funding that kick started this project and at the time we were just in the middle of implementation of the competency based curriculum at junior high school, and this project was motivated by the challenges that were being experienced at that stage.

Unfortunately, that funding was cut short because of the change in government in the US, which meant that we had to rely on small pockets of money that either we had at INNODEMS, and IDEMS came in support a great deal. Also we have an organisation in the UK called SAMI that started a crowdfunding campaign to support the work we are doing because they saw the value and the need in the work we are doing.

So there’s still an active crowdfunding campaign towards this work, but we are likely working without budget. So the hope is that once we have something started as we have, we can now get support to do comprehensive piloting of the work, and maybe bring in more experts. We want more mathematicians to come and interrogate the work we’re doing, we want actionable research coming in from education researchers and people doing research on technologies of education, especially in mathematics.

So I think going forward we are looking at bringing in more research oriented approaches towards the work, and also refining the work we are doing using experts. But that needs significant amounts of money that we don’t have currently.

[00:14:20] David: Absolutely, and it is worth referring people who are listening to this and inspired by the work you are doing to the crowdfunding campaign. You mentioned that actually even the small amount that has currently been raised, has been instrumental in you being able to do the amazing things you’re doing. So, continuing to raise bits of money through that is gonna really help. But as you say, the real change will come through research funding, being able to actually get the evidence behind this, being able to continue to develop the technologies.

We’ve actually done a previous episode, I believe, which highlighted the fact that the technologies you are using are totally cutting edge technologies, you’ve taken, or we’ve taken at IDEMS, the two technologies you wanted to use and enabled them to work together for the first time, nobody else has done this before. And they’re both open source technologies, so it was theoretically possible, but somebody needed to do it. And I can tell you in the US they’re now very interested in this. But you guys were first.

[00:15:23] Mike: And I think from the last conversation we had about the integration of PreTeXt, the technology for authoring textbooks, and STACK, the technology for digital assessment of STEM, we can see evidence that we now have a textbook in PreTeXt with STACK exercises that are blended almost seamlessly, and they’re working very, very well together.

So we are proud to have played a small part in the development of these technologies. But again, it’s informed by the needs we have, which are unique to our contexts and will keep on playing a central role. And going forward, to me, my biggest desire is to see a community of teachers working together to develop their resources for teaching and learning.

So if we can develop a platform, or maybe just an efficient way of teachers in different contexts working together to develop resources that address the needs of their learners in the contexts, that will be the biggest achievement as part of this project.

[00:16:33] David: I’ve got my marching orders, haven’t I? I understand, this is my responsibility to try and figure out how to develop this platform for you. I will do my best. One of the things which I think is really interesting in what you are asking is that this is a need everywhere. I think this is something which isn’t just a need in Kenya or in low resource environments. This is desirable everywhere and it has failed almost everywhere that’s tried to do elements of this.

And so what you are asking is genuinely hard, but we’ll do our best. We’ll try and do this, watch this space, six months a year down the line, we’ll have another episode and we’ll see where we get to. This has been inspiring as always and, you know, I used to think I was the one giving you work, but you flipped that on its head, it’s good, I’m happy, we’ll do our best.

[00:17:29] Mike: I’m afraid of always asking difficult questions, but when I look at the context where we are, you have teachers who are almost isolated and it’ll be great if teachers can learn from each other. So those opportunities are far, are very few, and as part of this project, and as we talk to teachers and motivate them, we are looking towards teachers creating their own communities where they can work together.

I know it’s central to the goals of IDEMS, and as I talk to teachers, as I interact with the educators, it’s also greatly needed where teachers can just have a platform to discuss their experiences and learn from each other. So that’s in great need and maybe something we can collaborate on as INNODEMS and IDEMS to figure out how to do this.

Obviously you have lots of experiences in Africa where you’ve spent a lot of time, you grew up in Africa, you’ve spent some time in Africa as a teacher and working in the corporate world, so you have a fair understanding of the African context. And so I think you understand best what’s needed as I explain it, and it’s something we can work together towards solving that problem.

You mentioned it’s hard, it’s failed in many places, and we can learn from those failures and maybe build something that will last.

[00:18:52] David: I mean, in all seriousness, I am really excited because I do understand the challenges you are describing, I’ve seen them first hand. As you said, I spent six years working as a lecturer in Kenya, I did teacher training, I had my own efforts, which failed broadly, at trying to influence the school in a different area, it was almost 15 years ago. Teacher trainings, worked with students, the math camps grew out of that work, which have been successful but not had the scalable impact that you are getting here.

So I do have a deep understanding of what the problem, the situation you are working in. And also I now have a deep understanding of why this is such a hard problem and why I think, it’s not that we can solve it because it’s not a solvable problem, these are just hard problems, they’re complex. But I think we can build something which doesn’t exist and which hasn’t existed before.

That’s where I think what I’m inspired by is, you know, you’ve got such an incredible team of people who are engaged in this process, who need supporting, where the need; the pain is acute. For us trying to just alleviate that in some way and build something which is truly innovative and new because of the need, and then finding that what we build is needed elsewhere, that’s what we are envisaging.

We really do think that you have a context which we can work together in where what we build could be truly different to other approaches that have been tried before. And I want to come back to this idea that you’ve got, which is central, that you want the teachers to be engaged in the ownership of the educational resources, in a way which I think is part of a capacity building of those teachers, this is what you are tying it in with.

You’ve also got this Master’s program, which you’re trying to launch at the Open University of Kenya, and tying these things together to actually build the social structures, and the open education resource structures, and the technology which weaves these together in interesting ways. This is something where it really is different to what I’ve seen and heard before.

And we’re in the position where as a not-for-profit social enterprise, we can enter into this without saying, well, how do we build technology which is going to extract from this system and think about how we build technology that serves what you are wanting to do.

This is an exciting, it’s an exciting moment where the technology and the need and the human capacity might all be coming together. Admittedly, finances would help, but that hopefully, once we are able to get other people on board with this, we can get people behind this exciting vision that you’ve got and that corresponds to how we see technology needs to be serving social situations in a totally different way.

[00:22:18] Mike: I totally agree that yes, finances will help, but having a vision of a solution I think is a starting point. So at INNODEMS, just like at IDEMS, we see these challenges as great opportunities to innovate and the innovations we have or we try to develop are normally cost effective.

That’s why we’ve been very successful working with almost no budgets to do the work we are doing. Right now we have volunteers, we have a young man volunteering at INNODEMS on the project coming from Australia. So he is going to volunteer six months of his time on this project. Of course, he is not paid. We have our university interns that we hired and trained, and at the moment we are just trying to barely sustain them, which is a big problem. I’m volunteering my time to the project.

And we have other people at INNODEMS also volunteering their time to the project because we have a vision of what a solution looks like. And, even without funding, we are working towards that solution. And we are grateful to organisations like IDEMS, we are extremely grateful to developers of PreTeXt and STACK because they’ve been able to work with us to implement the changes that we requested of them.

So thank you so much David for this conversation. I’m sure there’s a lot to talk about. There are different directions we can go with the conversation, but I think we’ve highlighted the major points of the project we’re working on with the grade 10 resources both for learners and teachers that we are currently developing and piloting with teachers. So I really appreciate the time, I really appreciate the support we’ve always gotten from you.

Some of this support comes almost without funding behind it. But especially the technological aspect, you’ve been very instrumental as an organisation trying to work towards integration of STACK and PreTeXt, and that has enabled the development of the resource to the far that we’ve brought it. So, I really appreciate your time and I thank you so much.

[00:24:38] David: No, this has been great. We’re gonna have to finish this, but it’s wonderful to talk to you as always. And there’s mutual thanks here because what you are doing, you’ve mentioned the core team, but you haven’t mentioned the wider team of lecturers, you’ve got different universities that are thinking of putting master’s students on studying this. There’s this huge network of people, there’s people within the ministry and within CEMASTEA who are looking at this in different ways. It’s just an incredible network of people passionate about this, keen to get these things solved to really help teachers.

[00:25:12] Mike: We have publishers.

[00:25:14] David: And publishers you’ve got who are interested in different ways. So yeah, there’s an incredible mix of people that you are pulling together to really try and do something amazing.

We should call it a day, and I look forward to maybe giving people an update a few months down the line.

[00:25:30] Mike: A few weeks down the line because we are having a sprint next week.

[00:25:33] David: Your timelines are much tighter than I’m used to, well, they’re the ones that I remember from when I lived in Kenya. So yeah, maybe we’ll have our next update in two weeks time, we’ll see.

[00:25:44] Mike: Thank you so much. Looking forward to another conversation.